Thursday, July 28, 2005

An emergency conference...

Iraq's constitution drafting committee called for an emergency summit for the leaders of political parties and religious factions in Iraq in order to override the remaining obstacles that are hindering finishing the final points of the constitution.The chief of the CDC, Humam Hammodi mentioned that they hope that the final draft will be available after the proposed Saturday conference which will be attended by Iraqi president Jalal Talbani and the president of the Kurdistan region Masoud Barzani.

This piece of news was mentioned this morning on several Iraqi newspapers and this call for a big conference obviously came after the semi-complete draft was released last Tuesday which was faced by a lot of disagreement and objections in the Iraqi street and from several political parties especially those of minorities.

The main points that are going to be discussed in this conference will-in my opinion-include the shape of the federalist system of the state, the issue of considering Islam the main source of legislation, the name of the state as well as case of considering Persian ethnicity among the components of the Iraqi society.

I have expressed my disagreement with the draft in the last post and actually I noticed that most of the people I met in the last couple of days share the same concerns I have and many people are disappointed by the weak performance of the CDC.Let's not forget that many of the public opinion polls that were conducted in Iraq in the past two years showed that a maximum of 15% of the voters would favor an Islamic state, so if the Saturday conference failed in dealing with the above points I mentioned, then I expect this constitution will be rejected by the voters.